


Twisted Messages

by poagthemoth



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Original Statement (The Magnus Archives), Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-16 00:27:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29941692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poagthemoth/pseuds/poagthemoth
Summary: Case #0131607Statement of Kes Campbell, regarding her experiences with technology throughout her life.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 1





	Twisted Messages

**Author's Note:**

> content warnings-
> 
> \- unreality  
> \- apocalyptic themes and imagery  
> \- body horror  
> \- paranoia  
> \- ableism (directed at the writer)  
> \- mention of drug use  
> \- abduction  
> \- imprisonment

STATEMENT BEGINS

I think the strangest thing about all this is that I used to be scared of so much I'm now not scared of. My phone would buzz faintly and I would almost jump out of my chair, but now I realise things are so different than how I thought they were. Our fears in this era pale in comparison for what is to come. This archive won't do much good for you in the end but, it wouldn't hurt to give my statement to you now that I'm here and you've met me.

It was 4 years ago if I can recall, in the sharp chill of late November. I had just moved away from Urmston into town the December before. I had scraped together enough money to move away from my parents and found a flat in a newly built tower block in Greater Manchester for less than it would cost nowadays. I was a mess back then, I had almost no friends or connections or I would have tried to move in with one years ago. I was freshly dropped out of Lancaster University 2 years before in 2007, having to go due to my anxiety and jumpiness that made it impossible for me to do work there. All in all, I was a 21 year old who thought the world was out to get me and was struggling to keep my head level with the rent at my door.

I'd always seen or heard things others hadn't, I saw shapes moving alleys and minute details that made no sense from when I was a child. Technology was some of the worst of it and the menial droning of it always seemed to twist into laughs if I listened too close. It was from here that I developed a morbid interest in Eschatology, I mean I thought these were signs of the end from technology, calling out to us and luring us to our doom. 

No one believed me about any of it of course, they always said "It's just a microwave it's not calling to anything", but the beep always sounded too coordinated and distorted. My parents had always sent me to psychiatrists as a child, but when I looked at them their eyes just seemed to turn as if I was being hypnotised. I got into fights with them a lot so they gave up eventually on sending me to them.

So there I was, living alone in a flat and isolated from anyone else. I thought maybe I would be safer and could protect myself if I was away from anyone else, which was true for some people, but not to the amount of paranoia and supposed "hallucinations" had induced in me through my childhood. I had as little technology as I could reduce my life to but living in this age and working a regular job takes at least basic technology for communication. It wasn't really too bad inside the flat though, it felt like my own personal bunker and I had grown used to some of the noises and sensations over the years enough to feel that I could comfortably deal with them. 

That life wasn't too hard or bad and I even managed to convince myself that maybe I was overreacting and that those noises and sights that no one else had ever seen were just, not there. I'm sure you know of the Twisting Deceit and how it works though so they certainly were real. It was that October when everything started to really spiral though. 

I received the first email in mid October when I got back to work from the nearby Costa. I was going through the basic work emails as I did daily when it appeared in the inbox, the title of the email was unreadable, it was so distorted and the pixels around it seemed to crackle. I immediately sent it to the bin, but found myself unable to clear the bin while it was in there. Well I wasn't going to click it and I didn't want it in my inbox so I just left it there and thought it would go away eventually. The next day I received another email, the lettering appeared the same, though it was just as unreadable, and I immediately sent it to the bin. 

These emails kept coming and more technology in my flat started to show more of these signs ever. I woke up in the middle of the night once to find my cheap TV screaming so loud it must have woken up everyone else on the floor, but all I saw on the screen was that it was cracked in great lines from the centre and had a gaping vortex of some sort in the centre that beckoned to pull me in. The crash of it on pavement certainly woke the neighbours up even if they couldn't hear the screaming. I had to destroy much of the technology this way but I never had the guts to get rid of the laptop or my old mobile. Those crackling emails kept coming through the bright laptop screen and I kept sending them into the bin seconds later, although they did seem more legible to my eyes as it went on. I had no idea who to ask for help as the IT technicians never saw any emails in my bin and had probably thought I was just on a never ending trip. Wasn't like I was going to ask my parents for help either.

These emails continued for over a month, into November. I thought the end times were coming so soon around that, the technology in there world around me seemed to be falling apart and hungering for me then. I wrote theories, I made charts and boards to link it all, but nothing seemed to make sense. When I showed some of it to my colleague he just thought I was joking and described it as a "illogical pattern of swirls and doodles". The email seemed to make more and more sense as the distortion of it grew more and more, until I got the text.

The text arrived on the 20th of November 2009, because that was the day it all changed. I woke up and hearing not much interference from within the flat turned my phone on from where I had left it the night before, away from me. I recognised it instantly in my inbox, my phone screen was a mess of colours around it but the title of the text was clear "An Amazing Opportunity For You!". I recognised this as the title of the same email I had been receiving for the past month and a bit. Without thinking I clicked on the text, I don't know what made do that to this day but the shape of it was irresistible and somewhere in the back of my mind I knew this would give me answers about what had been haunting me my entire life.

The text merely read out in bold lettering an advert "Amazing Limited Prices at Dewalt Bolster's Clothing, 33 Percent off! Hurry, offer ends 08/01/12". I shook my head, this couldn't be it? I had never heard of that store and the fact that something had haunted me and turned so many people on me to get me to visit a clothing store? It made no sense. I quickly got ready for work and went to go to my shift, but not before hearing a faint but staticy laughter in the back of my head.

I did my shift and began to walk back to my flat, a greater sense of unease with me than I had ever had. I was about to cross the street to the side of the road the tower block was on, the traffic lights had just turned green and seemed fairly normal today. Then I saw it, out of the corner of my eye. A yellow and green drab looking storefront to my right in the place of what had probably been a closed down store before I couldn't remember for sure. In large twisted lettering above the shuttered window was "Dewalt Bolster's Clothing Est 1999". It had never been there before, in the almost full year since I'd been here. I wanted to turn away and go home but there was that part of me that wanted to end this all and figure out what had been going on all these years. So I turned sharply and went to the bright yellow door of it, it had paint peeling off it in large sheets and seemed to show intricate patterns underneath like ones I had seen before. I placed my hand on the doorknob, turning it, and stepped in. 

I don't remember the door closing behind me but it did. Inside was what appeared to be just a clothing store with some boots and jackets and other items but, there was something wrong. The colours were all wrong in how they appeared at close inspection and the static that filled the air was coming from a radio stood on the counter was not usually played in stores I had been in. From inside I could see there was no window, only a pale yellow wall with cracked and dry wallpaper, the cracks almost smiling at me from everywhere. It was a square from what I remember, the clothes near the front and the counter at the back with the changing rooms to one side, thick curtains blocking any view of inside them from out here.

This all felt so wrong but maybe the clothes would have some answer to do with it so I went over to them. They seemed unnaturally shaped, too thin or jagged to wear as if made to annoy customers. I picked up a pair of boots almost without thinking, that were bumpy to the touch despite having the appearance of brown leather and went into the changing rooms to see what was in there. As I went in I heard that laugh I had heard earlier, was this place apocalypse, the end of humankind? I shook my head and just resolved to investigate these boots, the changing rooms seemed safer so I had to be in there to investigate them.

In the changing rooms, having pulled the curtain shut behind me, I started to look around me. It wasn't a changing room. It's hard to describe it but I seemed to be in a flat white expanse of a room, shining from all angles in cruel lights and twisted images of things I couldn't quite make out. I looked at my hands and there were no boots in them, I turned behind me and there was nothing but a laughing wall. Running forward I banged on it but it wouldn't stop laughing so I ran away from it and eventually saw a mirror. 

It stood almost circular, it's frame appeared sharp and hard but the inside seemed to shift and flow before my eyes. I had no idea what to do but if this was the apocalypse I wasn't going to spend it in this. I touched the mirror as if to speak to it like in fairy tales and it let my hand through as if a throat. I saw around my hand a thick vortex and the colours around the edge of my hand swirling, it seemed so familiar to but it seemed to want to let me through. I stepped through and felt a shudder through my body that felt cold at first but it was as if hot spikes were pressing against my flesh. I was in a corridor.

It appeared to be changing rooms? Curtains lined either side of it, covering up doorways and I went over to one of them and pulled the curtain away. Inside was a mirror of some rectangular shape that appeared to have used to been a person. Their body was cut into ribbons from the cracks that made up patterns on the glass. A curled up shape loosely kept together by a long white rope but still alive. I slammed the curtain shut and checked all the other mirrors and saw similiar sights you need not know of.

I reached one final doorway, the curtain already parted and a circular mirror like the one before I had gone through. The air was musty and a low buzzing could be heard. I thought this was the end of it all, seeing no other option I went into the mirror, desperate to escape this corridor. 

I wandered inside that mirror for too long, I couldn't say exactly how long though. It was pure glass and crystals. It made no sense and all the laws of science I had studied over the years to do with my Eschatology research were non-existent there. It was an awful place and it cut me to my brain of the impossible shapes and formations inside that maze. I believed whatever this thing was, it had sent me to the apocalypse and I was doomed forever here. That was when I smelled it, a smoky smell like the smell you smelled when you burn rubbish at a tip.

The place before had no smell so it stood out to me, then the harsh buzzing of the place was interrupted by a quiet breeze that sounded devoid of any life. Then all the glass shattered and fell apart in an instant. I curled up and closed my eyes as the structure fell apart around me, laid bare by something destructive. 

The atmosphere was different here, when I finally got up and opened my eyes I stood on top of the ruins of an old building. Around me there were the great ruins of a city, concrete and metal piled high and melted into each other. There was Life here I realised, but no life that seemed familiar to me. The Life was utterly new and deserved the Earth after us, it was beautiful. I realised at this point and would come to know more about it in the years since but, this was the true apocalypse. 

The apocalypse was not a Twisting Deceit driving you into a reflection of yourself, it was complete and utter annihilation of what you knew. It was breathtaking to stand in that point and see the pure destruction and nothingness. Us with our technology had caused this, be it nuclear or toxic. The air smelled of ash and an overpowering odour of pollution. I accepted this clear new future readily, seeing how I had been misled my entire life and that this was what I was meant to know of.

I still have my mental health problems of course, but I saw the doomed future that awaits us all and embraced it. I woke up a changed person on the streets lying next to a foul smelling scrapyard, it was the 24th of December. That fear has not bothered me since.

That should be it, I don't mean to cause you anymore trouble in the future but this old institute probably won't survive the change that awaits in the anyway. You cannot deny the future, you can only watch it happen after all.

STATEMENT ENDS

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!
> 
> feel free to give feedback  
> hopefully it isn't that bad its my first time really writing something like this :)
> 
> also of note this is not part of any larger fanfic plot i'm making just a oneshot with an oc i kinda like 
> 
> twitter- @poagthemoth


End file.
